If we’re lucky, the death of Slobodan Milosevic will bring renewed American and European focus on the fate of the western Balkans, which is still recovering from the dictator’s deadly legacy. After 10 years of battlefield defeats, genocide, repression, and warlordism, Serbians overthrew the Butcher of the Balkans amid street protests in 2001. Milosevic died humiliated in a Dutch prison, on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The region faces still lingering ethnic and religious tension; and any final resolution of the region’s political conflict is still some ways off.
Kosovo was the site of Milosevic’s final military defeat. His decade-long effort to marginalize and eventually drive out the ethnic Albanian majority in the southern Serbian province—essentially a system of apartheid and state terrorism—erupted into full fledged ethnic cleansing in late 1998. NATO finally bombed the Serbians into retreat, and the UN Mission in Kosovo has since governed the province with the help of NATO troops.
All that is about to change. The international community has begun final status talks with regional leaders, including the current Serbian government, and representatives from the Kosovo Albanian and Kosovo Serb communities. The province’s final status—independence or autonomy—will be decided within the next year. Whether final status can be resolved peacefully, through negotiation, is anybody’s guess. As recently as March 2004, Albanian mobs burned Serb villages after a spate of interethnic murder. Serb freedom of movement is very limited, and the remaining Serbs have retreated to ethnic enclaves around medieval Orthodox monasteries and to the north near Serbia proper. Serb leaders enforce a continuing boycott of the province’s nascent democratic institutions; Serbs in general avoid the new police force, and the gendarmerie established from the Kosovo rebel groups.
Perhaps most frightening is the dearth of realistic political dialogue between the two ethnic communities, particularly in the local media. Albanian-language media reflects Albanian demands for independence. Serbs almost universally support autonomous status under the sovereignty of the Serbian government in Belgrade. Both sides threaten violence if they do not get their way; June 2005 terrorist bombings that coincided with the arrival of a special UN fact-finding delegation reinforced the implicit Albanian threat of rebellion for any compromise short of full independence. A high-level contact in the north of Kosovo assures me that Serbian-majority municipalities will rebel if Kosovo is granted independence from Belgrade.
Yet neither community is preparing itself for these possible outcomes. Albanian-language media almost never addresses the threatened secession of Serb-majority municipalities; Serbian-language media seems to think that Belgrade will come the rescue at the last minute, protect their interests, and prevent independence. Milosevic’s legacy of hardened ethnic relations is still strong in Kosovo. As time runs out for the international community to broker an agreement on Kosovo’s final status, perhaps all parties may look at Milosevic’s legacy in the western Balkans and decide that violence is a road to travel no longer. We can be forgiven our hope that, in death, Milosevic will further ethnic reconciliation as well as he provoked hatred in life.
